379 
N5 F45 
opy 1 



lne Stor9 of 4ie 
Old French 
Market 

Nev? Orleans 

Catherine Cole 




Compliments of 

ni\e New Orleans Coffee Company 



Hlxe Stor? of trie 

Old Frenck 

Market 



New Orleans 
Catherine Cole 



Compliments of 
QKe New Orleans Coffee Companp 



■ A/rK 



•4S 



Copyright, 1916, by 
The New Orleans Coffee Co. 



MAY -I 1916 
©CI.A42877* 



^^^HOUGH America boasts but few antiquities, there are 
HCZ)H to be found, here and there, spots hallowed by age and 
gggS^ggg romance. Localities where one feels the littleness of 
the span of human life. Where are memories that go back far 
beyond our ken. Where the waves of birth, and life, and death 
have time and again risen and passed, leaving untouched some 
age-old, hoary monument to a time that once was but will never 
be again. 

Such is the French Market of New Orleans. 

Not old when measured by the span of the world of Phoenicia, 
Egypt or Rome. But gray and wrinkled with its weight of 
years in contrast with the pulsing modern life about it. 

Here, to those who can appreciate it, is something better 
than paths electric-lighted. A quaint, picturesque survival of a 
strange traffic feature of early days, when the lilies of France 
were native to the city that bears the name of the old Regent. 

I love the paths that lead to the old French Market And I 
love the entrancing perfumes that carry me back to those quaint 
old days when it was in the heyday of its glory. 

The dominant note is the spicy, fragrant accent that comes 
from the dark, delicious coffee that, more than any other one 
thing, is bound up with the traditions of the historic old building. 
I sit in a dim corner, where the tide of life passes me by, and 
muse and dream of days that are gone when all was unlike its 
present form save for the old Market and the selfsame aroma 
of the only coffee in all the world that has lived and thrived 
while the centuries passed, swiftly and silently, down the path- 
way of time. 

To find the old French Market one must go to the very 
cornerstone of the old town's history; to the gay, green remnant 
of the Place d'Armes, and even farther, where the river wraps 
the town in its tawny scarf as the mane of a lion caresses his neck. 

Down in the neighborhood of that old, gray-garbed Cathedral 
St. Louis, whose bulging, sharp-angled shoulders and belfried 



Breton towers lean far across the noon-sweet sky, is the way to 
the place we seek. 

As I look out at it from the dusk-collared corridor, with its 
lazy pretense of bustle of the Rue Chartres, I have corner-wise 
glimpses of stone alleys and damp flagged passages; and balconied 
streets line old Florentine loggias that lead the way past historic 
buildings toward the tumbled perspective of that King, Queen and 
Royal Family of markets — the French Market of New Orleans. 

Come with me along a footpath trodden by Atolycus no less 
than Saint, where the cool Cathedral closes are, past the tiny 
religious shops that sprout about the church. 

In a sort of monastic repose they pray under the shadow of 
the dull, granite cloud of the great Cathedral. In their window 
shrines pale virgins flower divinely sweet on their tall pedestals. 

Opposite a little oasis of green let into this Sahara of stone, 
banana trees wave their broad green flags; and the airily-petaled 

olive distills its sweeter than in- 
cense on the air. 

Across the passage St. Antoine, 
named a century ago in loving 
memory of that old, sweet Capu- 
chin whose bones are dust under 
the altars Don Almonaster built, 
a great tropic wistaria swings its 
purple flowers like a new sort of 
Jacob's ladder. 

It reaches from the Cathedral 
garden across the air, and up to 
the green jalousies behind which 
live the Cathedral priests. When 
services are dumb in the church 
they live there with their birds 
and books and missals; environed 
in priceless pieces of old-world 
furniture, and — like modern 
Robinson Crusoes — amused by 




the tongue-deep gossip of poll parrots. IJIn their doorways 
sit old sentinels of concierges, sharp-eyed and jealous, giving 
entrance only to those who come for shriving and prayer. 

The gay, town birds hop all the day long up and down 
that airy ladder of vines that binds the old church to the vestry 
house. One might think them feathered nuns telling their 
beads on this floral rosary. 

At the one side is the Cathedral like a hooded friar in frock of 
gray. On the other is the rich Spanish architecture of the old 
Cabildo, built in 1 794 by Don Andres Almonaster y Roxas, 
founder and builder of the Cathedral. 

Most famous of all the famous landmarks of the "Crescent 
City" is the old Cabildo. "Cabildo" is Spanish for Governing 
Council, and here the laws were made in those dim old days, 
before the Stars and Stripes — aye! even before the tri-color of 
France — floated over the city. 

It was here that Spain handed over her sovereignty over 
Louisiana to France. And here a few weeks later France, in 
turn, relinquished the "Louisiana Purchase" to the United States. 

La Fayette lived here in 
1825. The much - loved 
McKinley considered himself 
honored to be invited to speak 
from its quaint balconies. 

Later the Supreme Court of 
Louisiana found here an abode 
rich in historic suggestions of 
those earlier law makers. This 
is a law court to this day. 

Following the continental 
custom, when court is in session, 
heavy chain barriers are fes- 
tooned across each of the streets 
before the court; and all bare, 
silent and stately it becomes for 




the time "No Thoroughfare." So silent is it that the old maman 
on her skinny knees in the dim, dark church can hear above 
her own orisons, like the droning of a sawmill wheel, some 
"avocat" pleading before a human judge. 

Across the way I can see the broad, green smile of the 
public square. 

It is the old Place d'Armes, the tenting ground and bivouac 
of those first Creole colonists who gathered about their young 
French -Canadian commander, Sieur Jean Baptise Le Moyne 
de Bienville, and here slacked their arms and piled palms and 
palmettos for their sleeping couches. 

Here, too, stands the great bronze horse, superbly poised in 
the air, bearing in imperishable fame the hero of Chalmette. 
It is on almost the exact spot where, years before, Count 
O'Reilly, Governor of Louisiana, ordered to be shot five heroes 
whose crime was a cry for liberty. 

And it was here he burned all their books, with strange 
ceremonial, because in them they had dared to write the 
incendiary and disloyal word. 

It is an odd, prim, old-fashioned plaisance — this military 
square. I can shut my eyes and see it now. 

Its fences of fabulous wrought iron; its shining white shell 
walks performing stiff, geometrical figures; its lush luxuriance of 
vine and tree boundaried and confined by the pruning knife, 
where petisporum bushes perform feats in millinery, and hedges 
of box conform to the shapes of arm-chairs and divans. 

All is as stiff and prim as if cut out of pink and green glazed 
paper into silhouettes representing an old court garden of La 
Belle France. But all is violet sweet, as if powdered over with 
the fetching fragrance of olive and myrtle, verbena and rose, 
magnolia and bay, sweet basil and sweet alyssum, petunia and 
magnolia frescati, lemon and geranium. 

All these with roses galore spice the air with perfume and 
splash the sunshine with their vivid colors. 



To the right and left the huge Pontalba buildings are set 
againsT: the sky like cameos. And beyond these, riverward, 
where the blue bodied, red sailed luggers from the Barataria 
country tug at their tethers, I glimpse the picturesquely huddled 
colony of roofs and once gilded cupolas of the old market. 

The French folk say "Les Halles des Boucheries" — which 
in English means "The Meat Shops" — and that was the very 
first name of the old French Market. 

It was built much more than a hundred years ago by the 
town council for the convenience of the people. 

Built by the river, for the sake of the huntsmen and trap- 
pers who brought their heavily laden boats to rest in the still 
lagoons of the fallen tide. Built by the church for the sake of 
the entire community, who congregated there for every service. 

When the high-pooped, three-story Spanish galleons sailed 
into the harbor, the merchants displayed their cargoes of "corn 
and wine and oil," and silks and laces, in the market stalls. 
Then here came to buy, the governor's titled dame in stiff bro- 
cades; the shaven monk with sack on his back, and all the 
varied people of a city that was born cosmopolitan. 

Here, from the beginning, all the small cuisiniers set up on 
the black, cozy flagstones their braziers of charcoal and 
brewed over them that all but immortal decoction, fit to be 
bottled and sold as perfume from Araby the blest — French 
Market Coffee. 

It was and always will be the libation poured by poets and 
romancers who would tell the story of the old French Market, 
or paint the bizarre pictures of this historic old place of sales. 

At the very entrance to it all is a coffee stall. It instantly 
gives one the impression that the keynote of the whole 
French Market is coffee. Coffee is in the very air. 

"Cafe!" "Toujours Cafe!" 



It is called in satire the Cafe Rapido. From one end 



to 



the other of these long halls are marble slab counters with 
glass backs, filled with impossible pies and still more impossible 
cakes. 

Before these at intervals, are stationary, pewter-lidded 
bowls filled with white and brown sugar. Farther on are the 
coffee urns and the shiny tin heaters in which are kept hot 
and crisp those tasteless, melting crullers of puff paste, three of 
which go with each cup of coffee. 

But it is early for coffee. The delicate-nosed companion 
by my side objects to even French Market Coffee and puff 
paste crullers when accompanied by an obligato of Gargan- 
tuan rounds of beef and dear little pig babies, beautifully 
cleaned to be sure, and all ready for roasting, but looking 
awfully cannibalistic. 

And so we stroll on through the dim aisles of the old 
market. 

Time is not old enough to 
lay the ghosts that haunt the 
romance-strewn halls of the 
French Market. 

The mellow sunshine that 
dapples the river with silver, 
and flecks all the grim, gloomy 
eaves of the market roof with 
radiance, seems an oddly 
present-day setting for the 
tragedies and legends that 
cling to the history of the 
market like musk about 
Fontainebleau. 

At yonder rude bench 
where those tourist lovers are 
sitting, laughingly sipping 
their cafe noir or cafe au 
lait, once appeared the 




cowled head and sandaled feet of that old Pere Antoine 
— Antonio de Sedilla, Spanish priest — whose history is a picture 
page in the records of the town. 

For nigh onto a score of years this sweet, old ascetic, who 
humbled every desire of his life to the duties of his habit, per- 
formed all the marriages, absolved all the dying, buried all the 
dead, christened and confirmed all the young, and confessed 
all the living. As he threaded his way along the muddy 
streets, the people kneeled for his blessing and for the alms he 
was sure to bestow from the buckskin bag at his girdle. 

As he passed across the marketplace or stopped to rest 
under its cool and cloister-like arches of stone, the people held 
out to him their vapory cups of French Market Coffee, beg- 
ging him to touch it with his lips that it might bring them luck. 

Twice through his zeal he was suspended, and at last, after 
he had been absent for many days, he was found praying in a 
swamp surrounded by alligators, the long, gray Spanish moss 
tangled in his beard, while the rain dripped from his shaven 
head. 



His people brought him back, 
and forced his re-installation. 
When he died he was buried 
under the altar of the great 
Cathedral, and to this day 
tourists stop to whisper softly at 
his grave and, Protestant or 
Catholic, breathe a prayer for 
good luck's sake. 

At one time, mayhap half a 
century ago, each morning at a 
stated hour there came slowly 
across the flag-stones of the Rue 
Hospital, her slaves at her heels 
like trailing hounds, a stern, set- 
faced woman with sharp, hard 




eyes and a regal manner. She wore the hooped skirts, the shining 
silk flounces and the rich lace mantle of the gentry of that day. 

When she stopped to order purple fillets of beef even the 
butcher's hand trembled as he did her bidding. 

"Ma foi" said one, "I should think it would remind her too 
much of how she cuts off them poor niggers' ears!" 

Even then the city whispered of her cruelty. 

She was the lady of the grand mansion on Royal and Hos- 
pital streets. The whole town knew that she tortured her 
slaves, cut off their ears, nailed them to the floors in dungeons 
and garrets — why! the blood stains are there to this day! 

After her round of buying for the day she would seat 
herself at one of the many coffee stands — doubtless often at 
this very spot. Oh! Do not shrink! It was long ago, my 
dear! 

And here she would sip and sip the clear, dark decoction. 
Tradition has credited her with always using cafe noir. 
While all about a whisper fell among the market men and 
chance early morning visitors. Like one might see the shadow 
of a passing cloud obscure the cheery sun of noon. 

Cable has told, with tragic force, the story of the haunted 
house of the Rue Royal, and of its monster-hearted mistress, 
the Madame La Laurie. 

At last, when the outraged mob set on her to destroy her, 
she slipped stealthily from huge pillar to pillar, finally reaching 
her boat, which carried her across the river, whence she fled 
to France; the most hated, reviled, dishonored woman who 
had ever lived in the French quarter. 

In the years before the war, when to be Southern was to 
be proud, rich and gay, the great amusement was the French 
opera. 

The great works of Meyerbeer, Rossini and other masters 
were given in their entirety. As is yet the custom in many 



parts of Europe, the opera began at half-past six in the even- 
ing and lasted five or six hours. 

At its close it was the custom for the beaux and belles, well 
chaperoned by mothers, cousins and aunts, to come trooping 
across the narrow Passage St. Antoine to the French Market 
coffee stalls for the elixir of life dear to the Creole soul, cafe 
au lait or cafe noir. 

What a pretty picture it must have been, these dim stalls 
whose midnight gloom seems only acccentuated by the broad 
flare lights fastened near the salmon-tinted walls; the high, 
round arches festooned with garlands of silver-skinned garlic; 
green cabbages piled like so many decapitated heads across 
the stalls; and at the marble counter, perched on high stools, 
Angele and Elmire and Doudouce, laughing, rose-sweet, little 
French phrases escaping their red lips as broken pearls might pour 
from a vase, their young, fair faces rising from their opera 
hoods like a new lily slips from its sheath of green. 

Today, as we sit here, out in the noisy entrance to the 
bazaar market, a forlorn, toothless, grizzled negro, tremulous 
and foolish with age, tries to sell some very bad pineapples, 
which the fruit-dealer across the way has cast at him for alms. 

He arranges them on a board and lifts up his little, thin, 
cracked voice, as he cries: 

"Oh-he! Come Mamzelle-zelle-zelle! Vein ma petite! 
Oh, come! Whar is you mamzelle Elmire? Whar is you, 
ma petite Doudouce?" 

Across the stalls, where sit those New York tourists sipping 
their French Market Coffee, comes the perfume of Java and 
Mocha — or the richer, fuller fascination of the berry from the 
Pan-American tropics — and over it on that airy bridge that 
perfumes so often build for me, to carry me back to the "once 
upon a time," I see again the rose-sweet faces under the 
salmon and gray arches. I hear again the strains of "Robert," 
and glimpse the jasmines and violets lying on innocent girlish 
hearts. 



"Ah! Mamzelle-zelle-zelle! Where are you, ma petite"? 

But a little further down the paths of time we can in fancy 
hear the tread of horsemen in the sunny street. And through 
the stone arches of the old market — had we been there — we 
might have seen in brilliant but mud-stained uniforms, impet- 
uous Jackson — Andrew Jackson — and his officers fresh from 
the field of Chalmette. Out there, dead, in the blood-soaked 
trenches lay Pakenham, the English general, brother-in-law of 
the Duke of Wellington, with thousands of his men. 

But here the victorious leader stops his tired, yet happy 
officers and men, and calls loudly for every drop the market 
affords of French Market coffee, hot from the fire. Well 
have the troopers earned it. 

On another summer evening came a laughing, jesting 
group slipping across from the old Hotel St. Louis. The 
dark-haired, eagle-visaged man whose every syllable was 
music in the soft summer air was Henry Clay, he of the silver 
tongue and entrancing speech. Escaping from the great ban- 
quet given in his honor after his glowing tribute to the beauty 

of the women and the bravery 
of the men of the South, he 
had bethought him of his cup 
of French Market coffee, and 
inveigled a few of his friends 
to accompany him on a school- 
boy escapade to get it. 

Small wonder these gray old 
walls are soaked and steeped 
in romance! Small wonder that 
the spicy fragrance of that historic 
old coffee blend should raise the 
ghosts of years that have gone! 

Would you like to go through 
the market? As one might have 
done a century agone? 




Let us then have first just a soupcon of the famous coffee 
to sur our imagination, so that in place of modern clothes and 
modern faces we may, perhaps, see the people of the days 
gone by. For the French Market itself is as it always was. 
Time has not changed its gray arches. The centuries have 
passed lightly over its jumbled roofs. It will look to us as it 
looked to old Pere Antoine, to Madame La Laurie, Andrew 
Jackson, Henry Clay, and sweet Elmire, Angele and Doudouce. 

Are you ready? €][ Here on the shallow stone step of the 
Place d'Armes one finds the real beginning of the French 
Market. 

Here a Sicilian in her native costume looks at you from 
slumbrous eyes that hold no hint of mafia, and tempts you to 
let her twittering parrakeets tell your fortune. 

Here an old crone, sitting in the sun, holds up a curved 
palm, so hard, bony and polished it might be taken for a bit 
of cocoanut shell. In its hollow are two sea beans. M Dey 
is de male and de female! Dey is sholy good luck! One 
sinks while de odder swims!" 



It is true. Put in water one 
sinks, and the other precisely like 
it, swims. As for the good luck! 
Quien sahe? Who knows? 

At the corner, where a sort 
of delicatessen shop evades or 
ignores the Sunday law, a dago 
offers bananas at ten cents a 
dozen; and a beggar with an 
old, ramshackle organ wheens 
and wheezes out a persistent, 
if sadly frayed and tattered 
Trovatore. 

The pile of buildings that 
composes the French Market 



L *■ 




consists of several different edifices — the Meat Market, the 
Bazaar Market, the Fruit Market and the Vegetable and 
Fish Market. All of these are under different roofs. The 
medley throng of life that goes on is as picturesque, as unique 
and as vari-colored as if overhead were the gay tents of Con- 
stantinople stalls. 

What a mingling of people it is! 

Mistresses with their maids; quadroon dames still mumbling 
prayers left over on their lips from early mass in the old 
Cathedral; black- veiled sisters, aye! and black-skinned, too, 
with crucifixes hanging over their broad white linen collarettes 
and rosaries slinging on their wrists. Orphan children carrying 
baskets from the markets, tourists trying and pricing everything, 
young girls in bevies, fathers even at this early hour treating 
their flocks to huge wedges of yellow pound cake with great 
glasses of sarsaparilla soda. 

Here is an old woman with news-stand neatly arranged, 
showing all the journals of the day with, of course, the place 
of prominence given to that Nestor of all journals — "L'Abeille 
de la Nouvelle Orleans." 

But here is the Meat Market. 

The roof is supported by a forest of huge, square brick 
pillars that divide it into a center and two double side aisles. 
Around these pillars the stalls are built, with big lockers under- 
neath, and by each one is a section of a cypress tree of 
enormous size which is used as a cutting and chopping block. 
Overhead are pulleys, ropes, hoops and grappling tackle for 
handling the half of a huge beef or hanging it up when the 
market closes, as the law requires, at mid-day. 

After each day's sales are over the wooden blocks are 
scraped clean, and by this process many of them have in 
the course of years been worn down into deep basins. 

Here at one stall, dainty as a dainty chatelaine, in his linen 
blouse and linen apron, a butcher is deftly trimming mutton 



chops. With a turn of his wrist he loosens the meat in a long 
strip from the bone, and ties it around it, thus leaving a neat 
handle to be decorated with a paper frill after it has been 
broiled. 

Near him a iittle crowd of boys stand, anxious eyed, while 
another man slips a noose over their pet goat's horns and lifts 
the struggling animal to weigh it on the scales. He offers to 
pay them so much for the beast, which he may or may not 
palm off on his customers as: "Real spring lamb, so help me, 
ma'am!" 

In the ear is a babel of voices mingled in a shrill, untrans- 
latable Volapuk. The air is filled with all the perfume of 
Araby, strained through carcasses of beef, goats, sheep and 
pigs. Before the eye is a moving throng of all sorts and con- 
ditions of people, filling the long aisles, with their apparently 
endless vista of beef in fillets, sirloins and sweetbreads; cutlets 
ready larded for beef a la mode, or "daube" as the Creoles 
call it. 

At the end of the meat market a tiny flagged plaza spreads 
its twenty feet of width between the butcher stalls and the 
bazaar of the dry goods market. 

This little gray bit of foreground is one of the most pictur- 
esque places along the market side. 

It is here the Indian comes, that stolid, surly, usurped Queen 
of the St. Tammany Choctaws, accompanied by her women. 
And it is here they defer — but only for money's sake — to the 
appetites and esthetic tastes of the white woman and the 
white man, and sell them their garnerings of forest lore. 

They sit on their fat haunches, their wiry black locks hang- 
ing over their flabby jowls. All about them are the wares 
they have for sale. Pounded leaves of sassafras and laurel, 
forming that dark green powder, "Gumbo File." Bricks of 
palmetto roots that the conservative minority of housewives 
still prefer for scrubbing brushes. Fragrant fagots of sassafras, 
so good for a tisane in springtime; with bunches of dried 



bay leaves for flavoring soups and sauces and so delicious to 
place among one's linen and let it grow lavender-sweet as the 
days go by. 

Last and best of all, about them lie in green and bronze 
and amber piles, the sweet swamp canes and ribbon grasses 
woven into wonderful shapes and delicately dyed with the 
vegetable dyes, whose formula none but these Indians know. 

These baskets are of curious shapes. Here is one made in 
the sharp, three-cornered design, cut like a triangle. There is 
another like an elbow of a stovepipe; a third fashioned into a 
wall pocket for some lady's dressing case. Towering over all 
these are the huge Ali Baba baskets, square at the bottom, 
round at the top, and fitted with square covers that pull down 
like a Dutch smoker's cap. Each basket is amply large to 
hold a portly member of the Forty Thieves. 

These Indians are staunch Catholics, made so by a good 
priest of blessed memory, one Pere Roquets, who died 
awhile ago. To this day they hang his grave with bay leaves, 
wild lavender and sassafras. 

They sit here stolid and dull, in true savage taciturnity, their 
babies on their breasts and backs; a queer row of amber idols 

interpreted into the heart of 
modern civilization. 

When the market house bell 
rings at eleven - thirty to give 
notice that all must get ready for 
the closing, they rise, load up 
with their wares like typical 
beasts of burden, and — huge 
mountains of baskets, sacks of 
file, powdered sassafras leaves 
and bunches of bay — trudge off 
to their camp on the brown 
Tchefuncta river. 

But here is a coffee stall, 




dropped down in this cozy corner for just such passers-by as 
we two. 

Why, nonsense! Have another cup! 

Hurt you? Not a bit of it ! The market men drink it all 
day long — ten to fifteen cups a day. Sweet Angele and 
petite Doudouce would drink many cups at midnight, after the 
opera, and sleep like the babies they were, all through the soft 
summer night. 

This is French Market coffee, you must remember, not a 
bit like the ordinary coffee you have at home. They do say 
that in France and Austria there is coffee resembling French 
Market coffee. Of that I do not know. I only know there 
is only one real French Market coffee for me. 

Let us cross into the Bazaar — the Dry Goods Market. 
Isn't it queer? Its old French name was Bon Marche — "Cheap 
Sales." And many a modern department store has appro- 
priated the name. But not in all the world is there such 
another as this delicious spot. 

Many a rich merchant of olden days had here his beginning. 
Time was when these small shops were stocked with silks, 
laces and real linens. Even now 
it is a place of pretty confections, 
to tempt the picayune from 
one's purse. 

What a land of dry goods it 
is, to be sure! 

It is as if one went into a 
wonderland where everything 
was linen and lace and pins and 
needles and combs and calicoes 
and threads of cotton. It seems 
like a giant case wherein are 
hung hundreds of gay bandannas 
while pyramids of canvas 




and hose and ribbon are set all about. Where shopkeepers 
seemed condemned to eternal measuring and snipping of 
"Guinea Blue" calico, and where pretty, laughing girls are 
forever trying on dainty, ruffled sun-bonnets. Where the gay 
scalloped oilcloths for Marie's kitchen shelves glow like red 
flowers and where the "real Madras turbans" are kept. 

These are the genuine, old-time, gorgeous bandannas, all 
purple and green and gold — the royal colors of our Carnival 
king — and sacredly are they preserved for those high-toned 
old mammies, who can tell real Madras by the feel of it, and 
who would no more wear an imitation than a queen would 
wear a spurious crown. 

How slowly one penetrates these linen tunnels, where even 
the voice falls back, unreverberative, until at the distant end a 
gray eye of daylight looks in and feebly burnishes the ever-delight- 
ful crockery stalls, where are the quaintly shaped jugs and absurd 
cups, with marvelous magnificence in the way of cheap basins 
and gorgeous bowls that to the uninitiated might pose for the 
ancientest delft that ever sailed from Holland with the Pilgrim 
Fathers. 

These delicious crockery stalls are like the pottery market 
of Weisbaden, the damaged delft sale at Doulton, or the 
wonderful Swiss shops of Swiss Thun. Fancy a whole toilet 
set for a dollar, a dozen pieces of glassware for half that sum, 
or a real imitation cut crystal rose bowl for a couple of 
picayunes. Surely no curio collector's cabinet is complete 
without a fascinating hideousity from the china stalls of this 
market of markets! 

The outer edge of the bazaar wears a fringe of flowers, a 
sort of marginal note of bloom, in bouquets and potted plants. 

Here are street fakirs, fortune tellers, and venders of those 
sea shells that under all the market clamor still whisper the low 
music of the sea that lingers on their coral-pink lips, a memory 
of the green Adriatic or the blue Mediterranean. 

Near here are also the first of the fruit stalls, but these are 
only the approaches of the fruit market, the "little fruit market," 



as it were; just as in the ante-bellum days the red-brick town 
of St. Martinville on the banks of the Teche was called the 
"little Paris." 

One must cross the muddy streets to the market house num- 
ber three for the real fruit market of the town, passing en route 
the old pineapple peddler, who keeps up all the time his 
mournful call for those mythical "Mam'zelles Elmire and 
Doudouce!" 

What a piece of color it is, this fruit market of the old 
faubourg. Tadema might have spilled here his palette with 
all its waste of gold and saffron and yellow, for one sees his 
colors on orange and lemon and banana, with all its rust-red 
dyes on cocoanuts, mangoes, guavas, dates and plantains, and 
all its vivid greens and scarlets glowing on apple and pineapple. 

Each stall has a remarkable decoration of oranges piled up 
like cannon balls on a parade ground, or like the imposing 
front of an Egyptian Cheops. A nutty fragrance floats in the 
air from the bunches of bananas that swing like pendulums 
from the eaves, or which is emitted from the wedges of 
juice-dripping pineapples that, cut in sample slices, retail at a 
picayune apiece. 

Here is another coffee stand. Hear the familiar monotone, 
"Cafe noir" or "Cafe au lait\ n Almost one is tempted at so 
short an interval to sense again that delicious coffee memory 
that has come down to us across the centuries. 

But let us first investigate the squawking, calling poultry stalls. 
After awhile I will take you to a coffee stall where you shall 
have a farewell cup of such coffee as can be had nowhere 
on earth but in this old French Market. See those great, fat 
capons hanging by the legs, above platters of giblets for gour- 
mands! How those cages of geese and Creole spring chickens 
knit their continuous scream and chatter into the warp and woof 
of the human voices about! 

Such a noise! Let us go into the bread stalls. 



Here is a fit and proper accompaniment to possible pate de 
foi gras! What a mountain of crusty loaves! Truly the 
breads of all nations are to be had here! 

Here can be had French rolls delicately small; huge rusks 
as big as Cheshire cheeses and as heavy; long, slender braids 
of bread that must be pulled apart, never cut; black bread, 
brown bread, Dutch cakes, American bread, mixed with 
milk; French bread, raised with only a flour and water yeast; 
bread without any yeast at all; every loaf smoking hot from the 
oven, piled on shelves, or in big willow baskets, and giving out 
a wheaty smell that is better than caviar for the appetite. 

Very curious are the grocery stalls of this old market. They 
form a pyramid of color and at the same time a study in 
comestibles. At some of them even " quartee brade " is still 
solicited. That is, five cents can be used to purchase four 
different articles; say a little garlic, a pinch of cayenne, salt, and 
enough barley to flavor broth. That is the meaning of n quartee. 9 

On these stalls are sold more varieties of macaroni than there 
are days in the week, from a fine, red-shredded sort up to a 
broad flat band, and a paste cut, as Juliet wanted her Romeo 
— "into a little star." 

The list of grocery "sundries" 
is really more curious than 
inviting. There are dried capers, 
dried shrimps from the Malay 
camps on the Grand Chenier, 
olives in bulk and pickles in 
brine, mushroom chips and cocoa 
chips, salted black "gaspagou," 
and a curious black olive that 
has been boiled in olive oil, and 
that is perhaps the greatest 
thing under the sun. 

You do not "know beans" 
even if Breton bred, unless you 




have investigated the beans of the French Market. They 
range from black- eyed peas — which are really a kind of 
bean — to the kind that go so well in a n Jambalaya, n or are so 
fine made into a salad, on which, after the recipe of the elder 
Dumas, you have expended "vinegar like a miser, oil like a 
spendthrift, and the strength of a maniac in the wrist." 

It is in the grocery stalls, too, that the thrifty Creole house- 
wife, who believes in buying groceries in small quantities, gets 
her ham by the slice, breakfast bacon by the rasher, enough 
cheese to sprinkle her spaghetti, and enough caviar to spread 
those dainty sandwiches of salted cracker that precede dinner 
in good society and whet its appetite. 

Beyond the grocery stalls in the last of the "Halles" of the 
old market, are the vegetable stalls, the fish stalls, the flower 
women and the principal coffee stands, where the finest coffee 
is to be had. 

The aroma of a foreign country is in these last "Halles". 
Fat French women potter over 
the damp flagstones. The end- 
less click of their carved wooden 
sabots taps the pavement like 
the delicate croak of rain frogs. 

On the vegetable stalls one 
may find color enough and 
detail enough to have satisfied 
a Teniers. 

The faded red column that 
helps to support the roof wears 
at its capital a gray drapery of 
cobwebs looped loosely over 
the graceful iron brackets that 
spring toward the roof. All the 
rich wonders of an almost tropic 
garden are piled about this 
column. 




Shallots savory enough to tempt one to become a very un- 
Tennysonian "Lady of Shallot," hang in bouquets; crisp 
salads, chickory, lentil, leek, lettuce, are placed in dewy bunches 
next radishes, beets, carrots, butter-beans, alligator pears (a sort of 
mallow or squash), Brussels sprouts (idealized cabbage); posies 
of thyme and bay and sage and parsley; a bunch of pumpkins; 
and overhead, like big silver bells strung on cords, those ever- 
lasting garlics braided on their own beards. Often in the 
market, in order to further a sale, a pretty dago girl hangs 
across her shoulders half-a-dozen yards of garlic rope. Deftly 
she twists it over her arm as if it were a cobra, making a 
picture pretty enough to paint. 

On the flower stalls are tall, green tin hoods spiked all over 
with hollow handles, in which the flower women stick the 
stems of their stiff bouquets. The ones that are superlatively 
fine are set in a gay petticoat of paper lace and are perhaps 
sold to little grisette brides. 

It is an amusing picture to see a sedate gentleman standing 
meekly while a coquette of a flower girl — fifty years 
old if she is a day — leans puffing over her own stomach to 
fasten in his buttonhole a boutonniere of Parma violets whose 
fragrance floats like a benediction over the noisy stalls. 

The fish market is a charming study in grays and salmons 
and pinks and silver. It is perhaps the greatest fish market on 
the continent — almost I had said in the world. 

The glistening slabs of gray marble reflect the overhanging 
pent roofs, and Spanish mosses are twisted about the slender 
bars of iron on the stands. In baskets of latannier lie blue and 
scarlet crabs; in others are dark red crawfish looking like mini- 
ature lobsters. On beds of moss, like smaller lobsters still, the 
delicate river shrimps are fighting for life. They may be 
still powdered with the grits that tempted them into the fisher- 
man's net. Croakers hang in silver bunches; flat pompanos, 
their sleek skins shining, lie side by side with bluefish, Spanish 
mackerel, and trout for tenderloining. A large sea turtle has 
just been cut up, and the still quivering steaks and leaping 



golden eggs lie in the mammoth shell that the women of the 
sea coaSt would use as a cradle for their babies. 

Flounders caught at night by torchlight, and which are as 
delicate as an English sole, hang next to the queer sling-rays 
whose harpoon Stroke is poisonous. Nearby is an immense 
grouper that, weighing three hundred pounds, acts as an 
advertisement and attracts the cheap custom of darkies and 
dagos. 

At one Stall porky-looking chunks of meat are being eagerly 
bought by colored people. It is from a nice, fat alligator that, 
well boiled, would deceive a cannibal, it is said, so like is it to 
human flesh. 

On the game Stalls hang papabotes — which is Creole for 
"upland plover" — ducks, pelicans, grassets, sea snipe, 'possum — 
dried or freshly killed. 

If you buy crabs, by the way, the dealer throws over them 
a handful of Spanish moss in which they tangle their claws and 
cannot get away. 

Hereabout are most of the market eating Stalls. At some of 
them elaborate meals are served, while others are solely for the 
serving of French Market coffee and cakes. 

Big, round furnaces Stand on tripods and are filled with fires 
of charcoal. Over these, in skillets, women fry fish, cook 
oysters, or ham and eggs. In reserve are dishes of potato 
salad, corn beef, mutton (that may be the boys* goat), and a 
mass called plum pudding. 

On a separate fire the coffee-pot Steams. 

And now for that farewell pot of coffee I promised you! 
This is the spot where we will get in it perfection! 

Here, or hereabouts, "Old Rose," whose memory is 
embalmed in the amber of many a song and picture and story, 
kept the most famous coffee stall of the old French Market. 



She was a little negress who had earned the money to buy 
her freedom from slavery. Her coffee was like the benediction 
that follows after prayer; or if you prefer it, like the benedictine 
after dinner. 

It was something to see that black "Old Rose" pile the 
golden powder of ground French Market coffee into her 
French strainer — a heaping tablespoonful for each cup — and 
then when the pot was well heated, pour in just two table- 
spoonfuls, no more, of boiling water. 

In ten minutes this had soaked the coffee, and then, half a 
cup at a time, the boiling water was poured on and allowed to 
drip slowly. The result would be coffee, black, clear and 
sparkling — ideal French Market coffee! 

"What is it that you will have, madam?" Hark! Here comes 
the courtly old servitor. And then for fear we may not have 
understood him he repeats his question in musical French: 

"Que voules vous, Madame P" 

All about us is the din of the old market. 

Across the stalls is a French lady knuckling the cheese to 
see if it is fresh. 

The sedate, elderly gentleman is still being pinned with his 
boutonniere of violets. 

Old Sister Mary Josephine, who has just come from the 

convent and asylum fingers anxiously the yellow yams on the 

counter. They would be fine — she thinks, no doubt — for the 
children's feast day. 

A parrot, tumbling on his tin hoop, screams: " Comme sa Va? 9 
(how are you?), at every passer-by. 

Opposite, at another coffee stall, a beautiful young Creole 
belle has seated herself with her mamma. Mamma is on one 
side, her prayer book and rosary on the other. Truly she is 
safe between the law and the prophet. Something glistens on 



her forehead. It is the cross of holy water she has just dipped 
in the gray cathedral yonder. 

"What will you have, madam?" again re-questions the old, 
stately proprietor of the French Market Stalls. 

"Shall it be black coffee, or coffee with milk? Cafe noir or 
cafe au lait? n 

The steam curls up about your cup as if you had invoked a 
genie; and as you sit and sip, and sip, across the noisy chatter of 
the town and the French Market you hear again the sad, 
quaint, tremulous cry of the old negro with his pineapples: 

"Oh! Mamzelle Angele, whar is you? Whar is you, ma 
petite Doudouce?" 




LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




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